Wednesday 20 July 2016

Did Noah’s Flood Leave Rivers Beneath Greenland’s Glaciers?

Nuuk. Nowadays Greenland looks like this. Image courtesy of Oliver Schauf, public domain.




Joel Kontinen

Many geological discoveries suggest that our planet was once much warmer than it is now. We have read of Arctic dinosaur fossils, camel fossils in Canada, pollen from tropical trees in Antarctica
and a fossilised tropical forest in Norway, to name just a few examples.

We can probably add another interesting discovery to this list. An article posted on Live Science gives the gist:

A network of ancient rivers lies frozen in time beneath one of Greenland's largest glaciers, new research reveals.”

The article then mixes data and assumptions, featuring belief in millions of years:

The subglacial river network, which threads through much of Greenland's landmass and looks, from above, like the tiny nerve fibers radiating from a brain cell, may have influenced the fast-moving Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier over the past few million years.

We shouldn’t forget that that no one has actually dated the rivers and radiometric dating has serious defects.

It almost always is in conflict with dates obtained through the molecular clock approach.

Michael Cooper, a doctoral candidate in geography at the University of Bristol, UK, who with his colleagues wrote a paper on the rivers, thinks that the

Shape of the valleys and canyons beneath the ice [suggest that they were] likely formed by rivers cutting the rock away over time, rather than by the glacier.”

He points out that the valleys were V-shaped instead of being U-shaped. He proposes that they were formed before the ice age.

That might well have been during or just after the great Flood.

Huge aquifers in arid Northern Kenya, a semi-desert known for its Born Free books and TV series featuring the lioness Elsa and her cubs, might likewise be remnants of Noah’s Flood.

Mountain gaps and massive fossil graveyards also speak of a universal watery catastrophe.

We can’t be absolutely sure whether the hidden rivers are relics of Noah’s Flood but that seems to be a valid interpretation. What we know is that they are a glimpse into a world that differs a lot from ours.

Source:

Ghose, Tia. 2016. Secret World of Primeval Rivers Lies Beneath Greenland Glacier. Live Science (5 July).